Bulk viscosity of resonantly interacting fermions in the quantum virial expansion

Abstract

We consider two-component fermions with a zero-range interaction both in two and three dimensions and calculate the bulk viscosity for an arbitrary scattering length in the high-temperature regime. We evaluate the Kubo formula for the bulk viscosity using an expansion with respect to the fugacity, which acts as a small parameter at high temperatures. In the zero-frequency limit of the Kubo formula, pinch singularities emerge that reduce the order of the fugacity by one. These singularities can turn higher-order vertex corrections at nonzero frequencies into the leading order at zero frequency, so that all such contributions have to be resummed. We present an exact microscopic computation for the bulk viscosity in the high-temperature regime by taking into account these pinch singularities. For negative scattering lengths, we derive the complete bulk viscosity at second order in fugacity and show that a self-consistent equation to resum the vertex corrections is identical to a linearized kinetic equation. For positive scattering lengths, a new type of pinch singularity arises for bound pairs. We show that the pinch singularity for bound pairs leads to a first-order contribution to the bulk viscosity, which is one order lower than that for negative scattering lengths, and that the vertex corrections also provide first-order contributions. We propose a new kinetic equation for bound pairs that derives from a self-consistent equation to resum the vertex corrections.